Council on Spiritual Practices

Throughout recorded history, those inclined towards the sacred have employed a variety of techniques intheir spiritual practices, including prayer, meditation, silence, yoga, martial arts, fasting, plant sacraments,chanting, drumming, and dancing. Practitioners value these methods in their own right and for the benefits they cultivate in everyday life.

An occasional effect of such disciplines is the direct perception of unity and immediate encounter with the sacred, or primary religious experience. There is a yearning for community, spirituality, and primary religious experience in contemporary Western society.

For many people, spiritual practices are among the most valuable activities in their lives, and in the United States, the free exercise of religion is given the highest legal protection.

Furthermore, a growing body of literature provides evidence that primary religious experience benefits everyday life, teaching deeper understanding and respect for ourselves, for others, and for the balance of nature. ... Natural and synthetic psychedelics can thus be a means toward psycho-spiritual development, and the prohibition of their use constitutes restriction of religious freedom.

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It is outrageous that most governments deny to individuals seeking a greater spiritual understanding the opportunity to use psychedelics to this end. It is even more outrageous that individuals who nevertheless seek to widen their experience and knowledge by the use of psychedelics run the risk of spending years locked away in prison. This is religious persecution, and is as despicable as all the other religious persecutions known to history, especially in the U. S. A. , where freedom of religion is — supposedly — legally protected.

The informed use of entheogenic, consciousness-enhancing plants and drugs presents a direct and powerful challenge to any system that seeks to spoon-feed the masses with false ideals of nationalism, racism, sexism or pre-digested religion, and this is precisely the reason they have been criminalized. One does not go back to being led around by the nose once the fullness of one's humanity is realized, nor to eating pap once the full pleasures of eating are learned; besides, we need roughage or we fill up with our own waste. Expanded consciousness is one genie that can't be put back in the bottle and we're better off for it.

The cat is out of the bag. Pandora's box lies open. The cover has been blown off the ark of the covenant. Wisdom cries in the streets and shouts from the rooftops, once again trying to make herself heard above the din. Whoever has ears should listen. Whoever has a voice should consider speaking up, for the time of the end is near, as it always is in this brief life. — Clark Heinrich, "Last Word" in Strange Fruit Millions of us who sampled the psychedelics in the 1960s experienced profound, life-changing spiritual and philosophical revelations that were of incomparable personal value.

These experiences paralleled discoveries made with the aid of sacramental vegetable products by indigenous peoples from all parts of the world since ancient times — discoveries that are enshrined in the sacred scriptures and spiritual traditions of many of the world's religions. The "legal" persecution of those of us who freely choose to follow this ancient and honorable spiritual path — the yoga of light-containing herbs — is ethically indistinguishable from the persecution of witches and heretics, or the persecution of early Christians by the Roman state.

Whether or not the use of sacramental vegetable products meets with the approval of the civil authorities — or anyone else — it is a personal matter that clearly deserves the protection of the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, which promises that the "free exercise of religion" will not be abridged. — Dale R. Gowin, Confessions of An Amerikan LSD Eater In Drug Control in a Free Society (pages 31-32) J. Bakalar and L. Grinspoon write: "Members of the Native American Church, an Indian group, are allowed to take peyote in their religious rituals.

Here federal courts have found a fundamental right of the individual that overrides a state interest in suppressing nonmedical drug use; the guarantee of religious freedom in the First Amendment to the Constitution. In other words, the drug use has to be more than a pleasurable taste or pursuit before the law will allow it. To refute the presumption that nonmedical drug use is negligent, ignorant, and generally worthless, there must be overwhelming evidence that the drug users know what they are doing, consider it important in their lives, and believe seriously in its intrinsic value.

But even that is not enough. The courts have made it clear that they will not accept merely individual religious beliefs (much less consciousness expansion) as a justification for drug use, and they have said that they will scrutinize very skeptically the claims of any new organized churches. The drug must be not only religiously important to its user but also an essential part of a traditional rite with a communal significance. So far, the exception made for the Native American Church is unique.

It is as though mountain climbing were regarded as generally so dangerous and useless that climbers would be fined and jailed unless they could prove they were making a pilgrimage to a holy site on the peak certified by an established church. " Although in practice it may be necessary to work within the "system" to obtain legal rights to the use of psychedelic sacraments, there should not be any restriction on such rights in the first place. Who do these judges think they are, that they attempt to deny the right of individuals to use plants or synthetic compounds for the purposes of consciousness exploration and personal development?

On what basis do they presume to tell us what is or is not good for us? We are the best judges of what is good for us. We do not have to justify the use of psychedelic drugs for psychospiritual (or any other) purposes before any court. We have a natural right to change our mood or consciousness anyway we wish, provided we do not thereby cause harm, or likely harm, to others. Prohibition of the spiritual or psychotherapeutic use of psychedelics by individuals is a fundamental violation of human rights, and no legislation can change this fact.

The criminalization of what every responsible adult has a natural right to do does not thereby negate that natural right. No matter how many laws are passed in how many countries, making possession or use of drugs illegal, our natural right to use drugs remains undiminished. Humans have been using psychoactive plants for thousands of years, probably for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Humans were using drugs (in plants) to change their consciousness long before any human legal system was invented.

The imposition of authoritarian structures in the form of legal systems, etc. , cannot change the basic fact that humans have a natural right to continue an archaic human tradition of sacred plant use, now with the help of modern synthetic chemical knowledge to provide pure compounds and occasionally new ones. Legalization now! The present state of prohibition results from the imposition of the will of a minority (the drug lords, the legislators they buy, those who profit from the prison industry, lawyers, etc.;

Not to mention the, by now, practically self-funding — by the sale of siezed assets — "law enforcement" agencies that have arisen on the basis of the many asset forfeiture laws) upon a majority (those who know that they have a natural right to use drugs — or who don't think much about rights but just want to use drugs anyway), while the remainder of the citizens are hypnotized by the propaganda campaign they see nightly on TV and read daily (if they read at all) in the mainstream media.

The Drug War should have only one outcome — the admission of the present prohibitionists that those who use drugs have a right to do so (all such rights being subject to the condition that the exercise of the right does not constitute a harm to others) and in particular, a legal right. In other words, the Drug War should have only one outcome — the defeat of those who began it. This would happen if enough people were willing to stand up and defend their rights. This may be a vain hope.

As one of the most perceptive writers on drugs, David Lenson, has written: We must understand that the War on Drugs is a real war, one in which neither side will ever be able to bring the other to unconditional surrender. No lasting peace can ever come from the will of one side alone. This war will end as all intractable wars do, when the parties are sick of bloodshed. There must be a formal cease-fire, to be followed by peace talks. Let all the diplomatic protocols apply, just as if the enemy were not ourselves.

The silence wrought by the "Just Say No" campaign must be replaced by words, many, many words. And those words must come not only from police, doctors, sociologists, criminologists, and the usual experts, but from gang members, drug users, drug dealers, and underground manufacturers. — On Drugs (1995), pp. 200-201. If you (and your children, if you have any) are not to continue to live in a tyrannical police state, without freedom or dignity, it is time to stand up, speak out, and make your views known.